The Deadly Friday

Friday, August 5, has become the deadliest single day in terms of American losses during the whole 10-year US military campaign in Afghanistan. The crash of the helicopter in Wardak province took away 38 lives, including those of 30 elite US special force personnel. The Taliban have already claimed their responsibility for brining down the helicopter.

Overall, 2011 is not the deadliest year for Americans in Afghanistan. If compared to the peak 2010, it shows a certain decline in US military losses, approximately equal to that of the comparable period of 2009. But thirty soldiers killed in one day is an unprecedented number.

More so, one day later, a convoy of 15 NATO tankers supplying fuel to NATO occupation forces in Afghanistan was burned in Pakistan. The responsibility for the action was once again claimed by the Taliban.

Ever since the elimination of Osama bin Laden in May the US administration has been boasting of its successes in Afghanistan, proclaiming that the end of the war is near and the ultimate victory over the insurgents is inevitable. Well, now over 20 Navy SEALS died in one day – members of the same unit that was directly involved in bin Laden's elimination. And the total of US losses in Afghanistan has climbed up to 1,700 (with numbers increasing every year).

Now, this gives ground to doubts whether the promises given by the US president Barack Obama to end the US troop withdrawal by the end of 2014 are to be fulfilled, and even if so, will that mean the triumph of the whole military operation, or a complete failure.

Barack Obama, who has been persistently flopping all his endeavors during the two and a half years of his presidency – both domestically and internationally, is frantically seeking at least some firm ground to base his re-election campaign on. A couple of months ago, shortly after bin Laden's elimination, Afghanistan seemed to be a lucrative starting point. Now, the picture has changed completely.

Usually, an "ordinary American" does not care much for what is going on beyond the US borders, if it does not directly affect their interests. But 38 soldiers killed in one day are probably much more than the US society can bear.

And most probably, few people will be bothered with the question of who started the war. At the moment, a much more important question is: who has not stopped it? Looking at the numbers of the US troops involved in the warfare in Afghanistan and respectively at the numbers of the losses, we can see that Barack Obama has overdone what his predecessor had done. It is the two and a half years of Obama's presidency that have witnessed the largest score of American deaths in Afghanistan.

And this is only one side of the problem. The US special forces' operations raise a lot of criticism from both human rights organizations and the current Afghan authorities. The operations are usually conducted during nighttime and more often than not are conjugated with imminent large-scale human rights violations. The US officials make clumsy remarks that such raids yield less victims than indiscriminate airstrikes, but that only shows how helpless the US military command is in combating (or, trying to combat) the insurgency.

While the US and NATO command in Afghanistan is increasingly relying upon the special forces' raids rather than conventional warfare, more and more provinces are falling under the Taliban control, including Wardak province where the Friday tragedy occurred.

It has clearly demonstrated that the US military are not only incapable of achieving whatever aims they pursue in Afghanistan, but even unable to guarantee the safety of their own personnel.

And thus, Friday, August 5, has all the prerequisites of becoming the symbol of what is looming for the US and what happened to all other invaders who ever tried to conquer Afghanistan, and that is a complete and indisputable collapse.

Probably, this will not end up in a USSR-type collapse, but one thing is clear – if Barack Obama does not find at least a relatively respectable way out of the mess created by his predecessor and aggravated by his own administration, his prospects for re-election will seem vaguer and vaguer.